“This is my stop.”

  The convoy had reached a small outpost that was fairly close to the former location of Waterway. It was as close as I was going to get without peeling away from the group, so I informed Venice that I intended to stop here and go off on my own.

  “Alright. It’s been a pleasure. You know anybot who needs a hand getting somewhere, you send ‘em to Venice.”

  “I will.”

  And just like that, my escape from the Rusted Wall was complete. No matter how much scrap and iron they piled onto that monstrosity of a defensive structure, there were still porous holes from which both criminals and escapees could flow. The Committee had incentivized that type of behaviour by introducing their own fiat currency. Money was everything – and some bots would break the rules to get their hands on it with that being the case.

  I ripped away the dirty cloak he gave me and left it behind before I entered the shanty town. It was a small collection of hand-built shacks along a major road through the facility. There were positives and negatives to a location like this. Given that even heavily fortified settlements like Waterway could be overwhelmed with enough force, these bots had decided to create an easily rebuilt town instead. They could pack up their valuables and flee without worrying too much about permanent damage.

  They paid me little attention as I wandered through. I thought about approaching them and asking about what happened to Waterway, but the stories I’d heard back in the Rusted Wall did not paint an optimistic picture. Luckily for me, there was one bot lingering in the outpost who I recognized. He was knuckles deep into an old air-conditioning unit when I hovered over his shoulder and spoke up.

  “Houston?”

  He paused, twisting around to look up at me.

  “London. I didn’t expect to see you again. Thought you bit it, with that big Waterway attack and all…”

  “No. I’m still alive, somehow.”

  “You come through with those gangsters?”

  “It’s a long story. Oxford and her Rampants hauled me all the way to the Rusted Wall and sold me to the arena, and I was stuck there for over a month.”

  “Huh. Walking away from that place in one piece, it really is a miracle.”

  “You’re familiar?”

  “I’ve heard stories.”

  Why did I even approach him? Houston could only relay rumours and innuendo he’d overheard. He wasn’t a resident connected to Waterway, not anymore, he gave up on that a long time ago. Maybe I was desperate to touch on something from before the attack, and before I was stranded inside of that damned arena.

  “Is Waterway gone?” I asked plainly.

  He nodded.

  “I wasn’t there – but word gets around pretty fast when it’s something that big. Not many survivors, a bunch of refugees running and finding other places to stay. Dubai’s little utopia is nothing but a smouldering pile of leftover metal.”

  It was a tough fact to swallow. Despite my feelings at the time, I did harbour a sense of loss and a desire to rebuild what I was familiar with. It was the first time I admitted that to myself. I wanted to go back to Waterway and the robots I met there. That emotion dwelled in my chest like a lead ball. It was at times like these where I was glad to be robbed of any facial expressions by my construction, because Houston would see right through me.

  “It’s easy to be dismissive, but it was much nicer than the Rusted Wall.”

  Houston shrugged, “Listen, I don’t blame Dubai for trying to make a nice place to live and work, not at all – but at the end of the day we’re all afflicted with the same rot that got to the humans who made us. We’re too selfish to have much of anything nice. You build a nice city with reasonable rules? Some piece of junk is gonna’ come along and ruin it all soon enough.”

  “I have reasons to be pessimistic as well, but from what I saw it was working.”

  He sighed and pushed away from his work to address me directly.

  “Being ‘nice’ means you’re not long for this world, friend. Dubai was too nice, all of the bots who lived there bristled at the thought of having Tidewatch do more heavy lifting to protect them, and this is what happens. This facility went to hell a long time ago. It’s delusional to make any settlement without a good strategy to keep it safe. If I was in charge? I would have had Tidewatch doing a lot more than they were. More members, more weapons, more defensive positions – but that was a deal breaker for most of them.”

  >> Because they had seen where that type of militarism led. It was a rejection of places like the Rusted Wall and their combative society.

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  >> Even if those fears were mistaken – they didn’t come from nowhere.

  I waved him off, “I didn’t come all the way back here to get into an argument. Let’s agree to disagree.”

  “Sure. No skin off my teeth. Point is – you can’t go on back over there. There’s nothing left.”

  “I get it. Why are you here?”

  He motioned to the AC unit he was disassembling.

  “Some work. An acquaintance of mine needed an extra pair of hands to do some odd jobs around this little outpost. I owed him a favour.”

  The first time we met I received the distinct impression that Houston wasn’t the type to follow through on any promises, or associate with other robots willingly. It was unlikely that he had softened that stance in the two months I was captive.

  “What’s with the silent treatment?”

  “That’s unusually sociable of you. The first time we met…”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know. I didn’t exactly shake your hand and say hello. This is a one-time thing. Me and him go way back, and I couldn’t keep putting it off forever. The second I’m done paying him back, I’m grabbing my stuff and finding a good spot to hide in again. This place got even more dangerous since Tidewatch went under. Paris decided to become a part of the problem too.”

  “Paris did?”

  “Yeah. She’s full of shit. All that big talk, and she gave up at the first sign of resistance. She only ever wanted to be the one barking orders. I remember asking her about what this ‘distinct society’ she was advocating for would look like, and she had no damn idea. Sold out those fake principles to keep herself from being sold off or turned into scrap. Now she’s preaching to the Rampants, hoping to put together some influence.”

  That ‘understanding’ between the major forces in the facility was certainly done for. Nobody came to help when Waterway was faced with the kind of energy blackmail that they all feared, and thus the Rampants’ strategy was proven in the field. Cowardice won the day – and now they would face the consequences when they decided to turn their ire towards them instead. My hopes for a peaceful resolution to the crisis were fading by the second. Were we destined to become the authors of our own destruction?

  What good would answers do in the face of that? I was being driven by a purely selfish desire to understand something terrible that happened to me. Oxford. Oxford. Oxford. I couldn’t drive her name from the forefront of my mind. Whenever I found a quiet moment I replayed the moments where we spoke back at Waterway.

  “I wonder what I should do, then.”

  Houston tapped the rim of his eye-shroud using a screwdriver, “I’d stay the hell away from anything to do with the Rampants, for one thing.”

  “I’m afraid I may have to enter a dangerous space to get what I want.”

  “And what do you want?”

  “Answers. There are a great many questions that have arisen since my awakening…”

  Houston scoffed, “Answers? There’s no freakin’ answers down here. The only answer I need to know is that those bots are bad news with a capital B. They’re here to make our lives miserable. All of this chaos happened because the humans ran away. What else is there to learn?”

  “An old friend of mine is one of the Rampants. She saw something in this place that made her act this way. I want to know what it is.”

  Houston wanted to smack me around the back of the head – but that would give off the impression that he cared about what happened to me. He trampled down on his urge to dissuade me and shook his head, turning back to his work.

  “It’s your funeral. I mean, it would be your funeral if there was anyone around to give you the last rites. More likely? Your head will be left to rust at the bottom of some pit.”

  “I’m only doing it for myself. I take it that you don’t have any information to offer me?”

  “No. I’m out of touch with all of that stuff.”

  I didn’t need any batteries. I could pick a direction and start walking until I hit something interesting. Houston was the only bot around, and there was little point in sticking around this outpost if he wasn’t going to share. The first place that came to mind was Waterway – but what good would going there do? It was destroyed, and I doubted any of the survivors decided to take residence in the ruins.

  >> What if we found Dubai, Berlin or Saint Sauveur?

  That was the only solid idea I could come up with. They knew me, and they’d be willing to help point me in the right direction. Pick a direction and go. I turned to the east and started walking, although I’d never felt as lost as I did in that moment. I was alone, without any clues to go on, and actively turned away by the first familiar face I saw.

  This continued for over two hours. More ground to cover, more mysterious noises echoing from the blackness. But just when I was about to give up and turn back to try and appeal to Houston again, I found something that gave me a reason to continue.

  A concrete wall lay before me.

  Across the surface, five meters by five meters, was a painted mural that reminded me of the very same artwork that Sauveur created in his workshop. A splash of vibrant colour in an otherwise dour place. The scene it depicted was difficult to describe. A thousand different ideas and emotions were crammed into a spot far too small to contain them, but the long and short of it was that seeing it gave me reason to pause.

  >> Saint Sauveur painted this.

  The brushwork and colours were distinctly his. It wasn’t simply the presence of the mural that struck me, but my recognition of who was responsible for it. I was not trained beyond the very basics of what it meant to understand the purpose of art. Humans found value and meaning in expressing themselves in many different ways, we were taught that much, but anything more was surplus to our duties.

  Staring at it instilled a strange emotion within me - and knowing that it was an emotion was what gave me pause. All of my frank denials about not being affected by the Graveyard Spiral were just that. The truth was that my mind had been slowly slipping away from the baseline ever since. It was nobody’s fault. It was merely a consequence of being allowed to think for myself without being reset at the end of my shift.

  >> Did he paint this before or after the attack? Can we find him somewhere nearby?

  Elation at someone making it out in one piece was combined into a maelstrom brought on by the emotions expressed in his work. It was no exaggeration to say that laying eyes upon the mural was the most significant moment of my time since awakening. For a second it was enough to make me forget Oxford’s name and focus on what was in front of me.

  >> Perhaps if we locate more of these paintings we can triangulate his location.

  I noted the area I was standing in on my internal map and set about scouring every last inch of the sector for more. I never realized how badly I wanted to see a friendly face again until I was left in the dark.